Simon Stern

See Prof. Stern's pages on SSRN, academia.edu, google scholar, or ORCID, or this list of all publications.

B.A. (Yale), Ph.D., English (UC Berkeley), J.D. (Yale), member of the Washington, D.C. Bar. While in law school he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. After law school he clerked for Ronald M. Gould on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, practiced litigation at Shea & Gardner (now Goodwin Procter) in Washington, D.C., and then served as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

Prof. Stern teaches and researches in the areas of law and literature, legal history, law and sexuality, and criminal law.  He is President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and Humanities; a member of the Executive Board of the Law and Humanities Forum of the Modern Language Association; and a member of the editorial board of Law & Literature.  His research focuses on the evolution of legal doctrines and methods in relation to literary and intellectual history. Current research topics include the development of the "reasonable man" standard (and its precursors and analogues) since the eighteenth century, and the changing conception of legal fictions between the early modern period and the present. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Foundation for Legal Research, and the American Society for Legal History.

He is co-editor (with Robert Spoo) of the Law and Literature series published by Oxford University Press. With colleagues at other universities in North America, Europe, and the UK, he convenes the Works in Progress series in Law and Literature, which provides a venue for new work in the field. He is also co-editor of Critical Analysis of Law, and a co-editor of the New Rambler Review.

In 2012 Prof. Stern was the recipient of the SLS Partnership Award, bestowed by the U of T Students' Law Society in recognition of faculty members who have shown a commitment to student-friendly initiatives and student advocacy.

Ph.D. & S.J.D. advising      Prof. Stern supervises dissertation projects related to legal history, law and literature, eighteenth-century literature, criminal law, and law & sexuality. Recent and current projects include:  Michael Donnelly, For All Peoples and All Nations: Anglophone Literature and the Imaginative Work of International Law (1884-2017); Daniel Kennedy, Legal and Literary Fictions at the Early Modern Inns of Court; Michael Reid, Gay Lives: Literature, Secrecy, and the Problem of Evidence in Eighteenth-Century England; Daniel Del Gobbo, Feminism Goes to College: The Law and Politics of Campus Sexual Violence.